Ai2’s new small AI model outperforms similarly-sized models from Google, Meta

‘Tis the week for small AI fashions, it appears.

On Thursday, Ai2, the nonprofit AI analysis institute, launched Olmo 2 1B, a 1-billion-parameter mannequin that Ai2 claims beats similarly-sized fashions from Google, Meta, and Alibaba on a number of benchmarks. Parameters, generally known as weights, are the inner parts of a mannequin that information its habits.

Olmo 2 1B is out there beneath a permissive Apache 2.0 license on the AI dev platform Hugging Face. Not like most fashions, Olmo 2 1B could be replicated from scratch; Ai2 has offered the code and information units (Olmo-mix-1124, Dolmino-mix-1124) used to develop it.

Small fashions won’t be as succesful as their behemoth counterparts, however importantly, they don’t require beefy {hardware} to run. That makes them way more accessible for builders and hobbyists contending with the constraints of lower-end and shopper machines.

There’s been a raft of small mannequin launches over the previous few days, from Microsoft’s Phi 4 reasoning household to Qwen’s 2.5 Omni 3B. Most of those — and Olmo 2 1B — can simply run on a contemporary laptop computer or perhaps a cellular system.

Ai2 says that Olmo 2 1B was skilled on an information set of 4 trillion tokens from publicly out there, AI-generated, and manually created sources. Tokens are the uncooked bits of knowledge fashions ingest and generate — 1 million tokens is equal to about 750,000 phrases.

On a benchmark measuring arithmetic reasoning, GSM8K, Olmo 2 1B scores higher than Google’s Gemma 3 1B, Meta’s Llama 3.2 1B, and Alibaba’s Qwen 2.5 1.5B. Olmo 2 1B additionally eclipses the efficiency of these three fashions on TruthfulQA, a check for evaluating factual accuracy.

Ai2 warns that that Olmo 2 1B carries dangers, nevertheless. Like all AI fashions, it might probably produce “problematic outputs” together with dangerous and “delicate” content material, the group says, in addition to factually inaccurate statements. For these causes, Ai2 recommends in opposition to deploying Olmo 2 1B in industrial settings.